WASHINGTON, August 22, 2011 – The beauty of the internet has always been the disconnection of content and infrastructure.

Landline phone service was a one-to-one medium. It required the phone company’s infrastructure of wires and switches and telephones. Broadcast television was one-to-many. It relied upon the towers and transmitters of the broadcasters, plus a standard-issue television.

Let alone the fact that today we largely watch televisions connected to wires, and largely talk into mobile phones untethered to Ma Bell’s cords. There is the wealth of many-to-many communication through the multiplicity of applications that make the internet what it is today.

None of this, of course, is new – until one considers Washington’s subsidization schemes.

The Akron-based Knight Center of Digital Excellence was closed effective immediately on Thursday, according to OneCommunity, a Cleveland-based nonprofit that created the center two years ago through funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

WASHINGTON, November 16, 2009 – A working group of the non-profit U.S. Broadband Coalition on Friday released a report in which the group called for the federal government to “play an active role in stimulating adoption and use of advanced broadband connections.”

The group, one of six committees of the U.S. Broadband Coalition – which had gathered more than 160 organizations to push for a national broadband strategy – presented its finding at the Federal Communications Commission, after introductory remarks by Blair Levin, director of the FCC’s national broadband plan.